N.S.Gill's Ancient History Blog May 2008 Archive

Each month this year I've been writing up approximately 30 different words with Greek or Latin roots, showing one pronunciation possibility, a simple definition, and the Greek or Latin upon ... Read More

Wordless Wednesday and About.com's Wordless WednesdayPainting by Rembrandt - Photo in the Public Domain.

In recent months, the Ancient/Classical History Forum has seen an increase in the number of requests for translation of English expressions into Latin. Here are some examples from the ... Read More

In Breathing Life Into a "Dead Language", the About.com Guide to Catholicism reports that Latin never actually stopped being the official language of the Catholic Church. With the current pope, ... Read More

Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia. In Joyce Tyldesley's Neferiti [my review], much is made of the fact that it would be easy to mistake the famously beautiful queen, Nefertiti, for her ... Read More

Eclipse © Clipart.com The Rogue Classicist says that it may have been on this day in 585 B.C. that Thales predicted a solar eclipse. Eclipses were not yet familiar events ... Read More

Mary Lefkowitz is a Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. While known in the Classics community for books like Women's Life in Greece and Rome (written with ... Read More

I received an Indiana Jones-based question in email that I referred to the forum. Here's the question: ...[B]ut what might the oldest documentation of crystal skulls? Documentaries are popping up because of ... Read More

On the Washington Post/Newsweek Online (when did those two get hitched?) site is an article by a Notre Dame professor of Law and Theology on the evolution of marriage. ... Read More

It seemed appropriate to go from Wordless Wednesday to a non-illustrated Thursday's Word of the Day. Wordy Thursday? Depending on how you pronounce it, that may even rhyme. Today's word ... Read More

Wordless Wednesday

On this day in 1912, Moses Finley was born in New York City. After studying law, during the McCarthy era, Finley moved to England and taught classics at Cambridge University. ... Read More

The story of Cleopatra, her life and reign as pharaoh of Egypt, her affairs with Roman leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, her influence on Roman politics, and her flamboyant ... Read More

Rabinowitz' Greek Tragedy is like a modern, lecture-based course on Greek Tragedy, but in book form. As a supplement to a college course on the topic or for someone who ... Read More

Apollo © Clipart.com Ancient calendars rarely match modern calendar dates. The closest are dates on the Roman calendar because we use an adapted version of the Roman calendar today. The ... Read More

Wordless Wednesday

It's easy to say roughly what day it is in the Roman calendar, although there are problems with inaccuracy, especially before Caesar reformed the calendar, but in all, the Ides ... Read More

Constantine Public Domain In A.D. 330, Constantine the Great inaugurated his new capital city, the former Byzantium, which had started as a Greek colony in the 7th century B.C. ... Read More

On this day in ancient Rome, Romans appeased the spirits of the dead with beans.This was part of the Lemuria or Lemuralia, which was held on May 9, 11, and ... Read More

In last night's newsletter, I sent out a link to an article on Roman Mothers. Rose Williams suggested that I had left out a couple of important ones and sent me ... Read More

For the Western Church, the Christian holiday of Pentecost coincides with Mother's Day this year. For the Eastern Church, Pentecost will be on June 15, 2008, according to Nancy Gaifyllia, ... Read More

Most of the women who were important in the history of ancient Rome were wives and mothers. From these roles they could exert influence over both their children and husbands. ... Read More

Bingley, one of this site's guest writers and one of the bloggers for the Roman History Books and More blog, has come up with a great quiz for Falcophiles ... Read More

St. Helena © Clipart.com Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine I, traveled to the Holy Land where some believe she discovered the cross on which ... Read More

Our month of May is named for the Greek goddess or spring goddess Maia. This day in ancient Roman history was the anniversary of three Republican victories (Fasti Triumphales): 475 B.C. - ... Read More

If you live in the US and have access to the SciFi Channel, you may want to watch this week's Doctor Who adventure. I'm biased. Doctor Who is probably my ... Read More